A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Politics

  • Mission creep watch, the continuing series

    From today’s WaPo: An operation billed as a humanitarian intervention in Libya by President Obama was described in starkly more military terms Thursday by the administration’s top two defense officials. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told lawmakers that continuing coalition attacks on Libyan government troops — even when they were not directly threatening civilians — Read more

  • Friday Links

    –John Cohn at The New Republic on the end of “compassionate conservatism.” –Should life be more like a game? — The rise of white identity politics in DC? –From Book Forum, a collection of links on how we treat animals. (I guess that makes this a meta-link?) –How Pearl Jam went from being the biggest Read more

  • Mission creep watch

    As Kevin Drum notes, our mission in Libya–ostensibly aimed at protecting civilians from Qaddafi’s regime–has become a bona fide intervention into a civil war. When this was being pitched as a humanitarian effort to protect civilians, it seemed unseemly to ask about the character of the rebels or the nature of the government they would Read more

  • Depressing column of the week (month? year?)

    Bob Herbert is leaving the NYT and goes out with a tour de force: So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life Read more

  • Humanitarianism of convenience?

    Good post from Digby on the humanitarian rationale for our latest war: We intervene in places in which we have large financial and strategic interests, period. It’s merely a convenience to attach a humanitarian label to it and persuade everyone that we are doing God’s work instead. Even the arguments for Iraq were all wrapped Read more

  • Iowa factory farms try to put the clampdown on free speech

    I had blogged previously about efforts by factory farms and their political allies in Iowa to make it illegal to create videos or other evidence of the mistreatment of animals in intensive-farming facilities. But the bill under consideration apparently goes further than that. According to this editorial in the Des Moines Register (via Farm Sanctuary), Read more

  • Friday Links

    –Iowa’s House approved a bill to make it illegal to film the goings on in factory farms; it still has to pass the Senate. –The great Midwestern backlash. –What is the difference between liberals and libertarians? –Rejecting death-centered Christianity. –The fondness some secular liberals have for fundamentalism. –More than half of Americans now favor legal Read more

  • Meanwhile…

    …take all those proud feelings about the United States standing up for freedom and human rights in Libya and turn them inside out, and vomit into them. That’s Bahrain. More here. Sigh. Read more

  • The next war

    Well, it looks like we’re going for a hat trick–three wars at once! Qaddafi’s a monster, of course, but this is intervention into another nation’s civil war. And if the no-fly zone and “no-drive zone” don’t work (and given historical precedent, that’s not at all unlikely), the pressure for further escalation will be immense. I Read more

  • Whither the liberal-libertarian alliance?

    Here’s an interesting post from the new(ish) blog Bleeding-Heart Libertarians: Here are some policy areas where classical liberals or libertarians seem to have a lot of common ground with those on the political left: • Immigration – Immigration is a net benefit to the receiving country and a matter of justice to would-be migrants. We Read more